I'm settling into my new home on Ubuntu Karmic. It's taken a few days to migrate, clean, houskeep, prune, and integrate from it's home on the jaunty partition (and the encfs encrypted filesystem) onto the Karmic partition, which uses ecryptfs. It's all gone very smoothly, without a snag in sight.

It's startling when rox filer can fit every single file and folder in your home directory, including all the hidden files, into ONE screen. Neat.

I have also managed to get my dbmail email backend switched over from a mysql/innodb database to one using sqlite on my encrypted home. It was not difficult to discover the correct file permissions dbmail requires for the sqlite database file, and the dbmail IMAP daemon doesn't seem to mind that it's database is inaccessible until I login for the first time (the dbmail smtp mda runs entirely in userspace, so it doesn't mind either), and doesn't skip a beat when it becomes available on login. Not bad. I'm using fetchmail to transfer mail from my server to dbmail periodically.

Another great thing about ecryptfs is that, while yoru encrypted home is unmounted as soon as all your sessions are logged it, the kernel keeps your key on hand, just as long as you've logged in at least once, so any cron jobs that the user runs prompt the system to automatically re-mount the encrypted home partition before the cron job runs - and, of course, the partition is unmounted again when it completes. Pretty handy.

What this means is that all the authorized logins for my user will get access to the encrypted partition, so long as I have logged in with a password at least once since the last boot. As soon as the system shuts down, the keys are lost until I login again.

I still have to figure out what things to backup and what to delete, and reconstruct a remote backup scheme for everything. I have no fewer than *12* different places where email archives exist over the years; they need to be consolidated, de-duplicated, and stored in some uniform way.

I found a cache of old, old writings and music I was playing with from 2002 all the way back to 1998. That was fun.